For a chance at a youthful complexion, you could slap rendered cow fat on your face, rub snail slime into your wrinkles, or get a salmon sperm facial right after a microneedling treatment.
You read that right: These are things actual people are doing. Influencers, celebrities, and everyday consumers alike are touting the youthful glow such animal-derived products bring to their complexion.
For some consumers, opting for a product like beef tallow is an intentional decision to move away from the conventional skincare products typically sold at the drug store or Sephora. It’s understandable — every day, it seems, we’re told of new horror about how forever chemicals and microplastics are embedded into our environment and bodies. From food to skincare, US consumers have shown they want to distance themselves from potentially unhealthy or toxic ingredients. They’re looking for products that market themselves as clean, concerned that the ingredients in typical treatments are worsening issues like acne or are harmful for long-term health. Beef tallow is a type of MAHA-ism for beauty (and for food, too).
I’ve struggled with bad eczema flare-ups my whole life, so I know what it’s like to be frustrated with endlessly dry and patchy skin.
But according to Sentient, the benefits of beef tallow as a skincare product are “largely unremarkable.” And while some may see relief for their skin ailments, it could also worsen their issues. Just like any product for the skin, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
The cosmetics industry sold over $400 billion worth of products in 2023, with skincare making up the sector’s largest category. It’s easy to get sucked into the rabbit hole that is becoming beautiful, especially in a world that is all about maximizing self-improvement. Skincare, in particular, is a personal issue for me — I’ve had eczema my whole life, and when I’m having a particularly bad flare-up, I feel insecure and desperate for a cure. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel good about yourself.
But there is an ethical problem if feeling good about yourself comes at the expense of animals — and that’s increasingly the case with these new clean beauty trends.
The cosmetics sector has long — and, at times, quietly — depended on animals, much like the agriculture and fashion industries. Way before folks were spending $44 on beef tallow whipped with chamomile, everyday products like hair-strengthening shampoos featured keratin (usually derived from animal fur or hooves), lipstick pigments depended on carmine (ground-up bugs), and anti-aging moisturizers incorporated collagen (a structural protein found in animal hides and fish skin). That’s not including animal testing to ensure the safety of ingredients in cosmetics.
While some consumers are intentionally seeking out animal-derived products and treatments, plenty of consumers aren’t necessarily concerned about what’s in their cosmetics, or are perhaps unaware of how a certain science-y sounding ingredient is sourced. Instead, they orient more toward what’s trendy or seemingly effective.
Whatever the reason may be for using animal-based skincare and beauty products, we’re still ignoring a larger problem. Just because something comes from an animal, it doesn’t mean the process of getting into our hands is “clean” or “natural.” And even if some of these animal-derived products have beneficial properties for our skin, it still comes at a cost bigger than we realize.
In reality, many of these beauty trends that claim to be against the “toxic” nature of mainstream wellness or those touting the benefits of animal-based products are upholding the very industries that are harming our planet. And in turn, it’s harming ourselves — a steep cost for beauty.
“Clean” living, dirty consequences
When I saw beef tallow hawked on social media, one question immediately came to mind: How were these businesses sourcing their animal ingredients?
That led me to look up “beef tallow for skin” on Amazon, where there were pages upon pages of results. They all used similar language to describe their product: “ancestral,” “natural,” “organic.” Most of the sellers advertised themselves as small businesses and included images of cows on their product packaging, to further hammer home that what you’re purchasing differs from big, mainstream beauty.
Beef tallow for skin is made by taking the fat of a cow and rendering it until it’s ready to be whipped into a cream-like moisturizer. So where are these cows to begin with? Of the nine products I looked at with 300 reviews or more on Amazon, only one named a small farm in Virginia as a supplier. The others simply listed that their tallow came from “grass-fed” cows.
While the term “grass-fed” may suggest to some consumers the pinnacle of animal welfare and sustainability, the reality is far more complicated. For starters, virtually all cows spend most of their lives on pasture eating grass; it’s only until their final months that they’re moved into feedlots, which are pastureless, outdoor dirt pens — in essence, factory farms for cattle. (Per USDA guidelines, “grass-fed” cows are never supposed to enter feedlots and remain on pasture during their final months, though the agency doesn’t go on to ranches to verify them and there’s a long history of meat companies misleading the public on these types of claims.)
Feedlots are worse for animal welfare, but “grass-fed” beef has its own sustainability problems, so there are tradeoffs between the two systems. But ultimately, sustainability and animal welfare claims on animal products are poorly regulated, and it’s even harder to trace/verify these claims once they wind up on a skincare product.
This cattle ranch in Coalinga, CA is one of the largest feedlots in the United States. Vince Penn / We Animals
“Terms like sustainability, farm-raised, so forth, are pretty broad,” said Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist and assistant professor at Kansas State University. “There’s not an internationally accepted standard that you got to cross-check on.” So language like “grass-fed” doesn’t help determine the source of the beef or how high-quality it is — but businesses use them anyway in marketing their products because they’re aware these terms appeal to consumers and elicit a sense of naturalness and quality.
One of the beef tallow moisturizers on Amazon with over 700 reviews had no website to find any other information — just an Amazon storefront with other beef tallow beauty products. It also advertised its beef tallow as “organic,” a claim that should make you raise your eyebrow because the US Department of Agriculture does have regulations for food products labeled as organic. While the USDA doesn’t oversee cosmetics, beauty products with agricultural ingredients can be organic-certified by the USDA if they meet the standards.
“There’s hardly any organic beef production,” says Richard Sexton, a University of California Davis agricultural economist, when I asked him about beef by-product sourcing. “I don’t really know how they can say that the by-products are organic.”
Tonsor added another way to think about vague claims on products: “If somebody tries to sell you gluten-free water, don’t pay a premium for it.”
And while “grass-fed” can give off the vibe of a more green, natural, or sustainable process, it’s actually worse for the climate, says Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University. “Grass-fed trades off not eating corn and soy for living longer, requiring more land, and producing more greenhouse gasses,” the 2024 Future Perfect 50 honoree told me. Over a third of methane emissions from human activity comes from our agricultural practices, with cattle being the main driver. (Cattle burps are rich in methane).
Big environmental impacts like global greenhouse gas emissions can feel abstract, but for the people living near big cattle operations, the externalities from these facilities are anything but. Hundreds to thousands of beef cattle can be found on a singular feedlot, and they generate huge amounts of manure. In the US, factory farms — including those raising cows, pigs, and chickens —produce nearly a trillion pounds of waste a year, which ends up in giant piles, massive lagoons, or sprayed onto neighboring fields as fertilizer. People who live within miles of factory farms report terrible stenches that keep them indoors and force them to have their windows closed.
When animal waste breaks down, it forms pollutants like ammonia gas. Ammonia emits a deeply unpleasant smell, and exposure can lead to symptoms like headaches, irritated eyes, skin, and lungs. One study found that there are 12,700 premature deaths annually attributed to increased fine particulate matter pollution (largely driven by ammonia) from the production of animal-based food. And 4,000 of those deaths are specifically attributed to beef cattle. Communities near factory farms have also reported animal waste polluting their waterways with nitrates.
So while “grass-fed” beef tallow for skin has been popularized by content creators on platforms like TikTok for it being “natural” and “clean” because it’s animal-derived, it’s likely that it’s helping bolster an industry that’s polluting local communities and our planet.
Tallow isn’t the only cattle by-product used in skincare that has serious environmental consequences. A 2023 collaborative investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, Center for Climate Crime Analysis, ITV, and O Joio e O Trigo found that collagen operations in Brazil drove the deforestation of at least 1,000 sq. mi of tropical forest as well as violence against Indigenous peoples occupying that land. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef, and as demand for collagen booms, more land will be needed to raise cattle. The cattle industry has driven 80 percent of Amazon forest loss in Brazil, according to the investigation.
Even calling beef tallow or collagen “by-products” undermines how useful they can be as profit-makers to the meat industry, even if they generate far less money than the parts we eat. “If something fetches a price, then it’s not a by-product,” Hayek said. “It’s another revenue generating production stream. It’s a co-product.”
The strangeness of snail slime and salmon sperm
Sourcing for even more niche animal-based products, like snail mucin and salmon sperm skincare treatments, is not as easy to track as beef. Both were popularized in South Korea, a leader in the cosmetics and skincare industry.
Snail mucin has made a recent comeback in the US with popular products like COSRX’s snail essence formula, which has nearly 4,000 reviews on Ulta, a cosmetics chain. An article from Racked reported that the process for sourcing and extracting snail mucin is intentionally mysterious because beauty companies don’t want their competition to know the technology they use.
A 2022 Business Insider video showed just that, however, uncovering how one snail production hub in Italy extracted their mucin. After receiving the snails from local snail farms, the small creatures were placed inside machines where they were sprayed with an acidic solution that caused the snails to excrete their slime. The institution said it was a cruelty-free process, but after repeating this process a few times, the snails were euthanized and were used for cooking and other cosmetic products.
Salmon sperm facials are much newer to the scene than snail mucin. In South Korea, the process involves injecting polydeoxyribonucleotide (PDRN), which are fragments of DNA from salmon sperm, all over the face. In the US, salmon DNA injections have not been approved by the FDA, so cosmetic spas often apply PDRN topically after microneedling in order for the product to be absorbed.
Jennifer Aniston, who has received a salmon sperm facial, had the same question as I did when I first heard about these treatments: “How do you get salmon’s sperm?” she asked the Wall Street Journal in 2023. I called up eight cosmetic spas to ask where they sourced their salmon DNA, and scoured several others’ websites for any details. While there appears to be at least a few PDRN products being used by professionals, the one that came up the most was Rejuran. Their website for cosmetic spas says they source PDRN from wild salmon in Korea, and their retail US website says they seek ways to reduce their environmental impact across their operations.
I emailed Rejuran for more details about where the salmon comes from for their PDRN-based products, as well as if their environmental efforts extend to how they source their salmon. They have not yet responded.
Most of the fish we use today comes from aquaculture production, which farms fish and other aquatic life, while the rest is wild caught in fisheries. While fish has less of an environmental impact than other animals commonly used for consumption (like cows), fisheries still come with their fair share of sustainability issues, like damaging seabeds, unintentionally catching other marine animals, and overfishing.
The individualism of “clean” beauty
If you take an extra minute or two to think about it, the strangeness of using animals for something as superficial as perfect skin starts to set in. Couple that with obscure sourcing practices, harmful environmental impacts, and questionable animal welfare practices, and the cost of it all starts to add up.
But when you feel the pressure to look a certain way, it’s easy to gloss over how the sausage — or in some cases, serum — gets made.
The desire to have a healthy body, to have access to healthy food and water, and for our environment to be free from harmful toxins is a right we all deserve. This newest iteration of skincare trends advertised as clean, natural, and animal-derived, however, ultimately does nothing to make that goal a reality.
Want to let go of animal products in your skincare routine? Here’s how to start:
This list by Shop Like You Give a Damn lays out common beauty and skincare ingredients that are always, often, or sometimes animal-derived. Next time you’re shopping for a new moisturizer or serum, you can use the list to cross-reference and determine which products are free of animal-based ingredients.
There’s no official definition of clean beauty, but the general idea refers to skincare and cosmetics that exclude ingredients that could be harmful to our bodies, like parabens. Much of this parallels the rise of returning to “clean living” and “ancestral diets.” People are cutting out dyes, preservatives, and ultra-processed foods in favor of eating high protein, animal-based diets and using only “non-toxic” products. It’s a lifestyle that’s been around for a while but it’s making a strong comeback in tandem with the Make American Healthy Again movement.
As it tends to be with wellness and beauty, this revitalized uptick in animal-based beauty is deeply individualistic. Here’s how you can look younger longer, here’s how you can be more beautiful, here’s how you can remove toxins from your body. The prioritization of personal validation over communal health encourages people to trust surface-level statements about what’s “clean” and what’s not at face value.
It’s true that nearly everything humans do is extractive one way or another, but that’s not a reason to avoid acknowledging our participation in that cost. If people want to get real about healthier communities and a cleaner world, it can’t be done alone by individually buying your way toward there. It’s much harder and more complicated than that, and I know that the average person doesn’t have the resources to seriously address these issues.
Stronger regulations for both the food and beauty industry could take the responsibility off of consumers and instead put it on companies. In 2022, the US passed the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act, which intended to do this very thing by giving the Food and Drug Administration regulatory power over cosmetics. But according to Allure, advocates feared that implementation would be delayed after Donald Trump won the 2024 election due to potential FDA cuts. Just last month, hundreds of employees at federal health agencies, including the FDA, were fired.
In the meantime, maybe a small step in the right direction is to look away from our reflection in the mirror, pay more attention to what we’re consuming, and to dig a little deeper if the cost — supporting industries that are contributing to local air and water pollution, climate change, and questionable animal welfare practices — is worth the price.
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